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Comment by anon291 | Hacker News Reader

This is a dangerous path to go down without a really full understanding of the situation and the acknowledgement that your statement is covering hundreds of thousands of individual compacts between specific tribal leaders and specific administrators. Additionally "tribes wanted" is a really dangerous statement on its own since "tribes" can be hard to define fairly - if you've been following the news about pipelines you may have heard specific tribes both assent and dissenting to access through their lands. A lot of tribes have a pretty loose organization of leadership consisting of both Hereditary and Elected chiefs - and, when it's convenient, governments will occasionally just recognize any old rando they can find that agrees with them as a representative of the tribe.

This is a really hairy topic to begin with and it gets a lot more hairy when you also take into consideration that tribes were frequently being lied to. Canada doesn't have a great record of being either upfront nor fidelitous when it comes to compacts with native americans and if we only have primary contemporary accounts from the "winning side" you need to be highly skeptical of how biased those accounts are.

We absolutely have accounts of children being forceably abducted from parents and abuses happening at these schools - whether tribes were initially lied to and sold a rosy picture or whether that force was used initially is an interesting topic, but it's one that we will probably only have clarity on for a handful of tribes and it might take quite a while to settle on a narrative of that topic that can be well supported by evidence.

It's really complicated.

First, we need to dispense with rhetoric like 'this is a dangerous path'. I fully understand that tribes are different and people disagree and in particular, that 'tribes' are ruled by people who may not actually be in charge, may not reflect their tribe's real viewpoint, or may have ulterior motives.

However, it is equally dangerous to go down the path of 'Canada did this to massacre the tribes and eradicate their culture while no tribe wanted this'. This is also not the case. In certain cases, the tribes did have well defined boundaries, and leadership, and the leadership negotiated for many other concessions successfully, but didn't so much as put up a fuss about the schools.

> We absolutely have accounts of children being forceably abducted from parents and abuses happening at these schools

I believe I literally acknowledged such atrocities in my post above. Moreover, as I again stated, I understand that a tribe's leaders may not have the tribe's best interests at heart. It is actually possible, and still a regular occurrence today, for one's government to make decisions that are incredibly hurtful to individual citizens.

Other allegations against the government are also overstated. I didn't mention them above. One obvious example is the claim siblings were separated. This is actually unevidenced. The most evidence the TRC could produce was that brothers and sisters were sent to sex segregated schools or dorms. Uh... this is a good thing. If sexual abuse is what you're trying to prevent having girls in the same housing with boys, etc, is going to be extremely toxic.

I am in no way excusing Canada's actions. I am merely putting them into context. These are salient facts ignored from the debate for fear they may not make the tribes as sympathetic a target. Why? If the case is so strong for the abuses taking place (and I believe there was certainly abuse taking place that ought to be investigated), what is the point of ignoring salient information?

EDIT: Oh also I'm not referring to hundreds of thousands of compacts. I am referring to the numbered treaties, which refer to 11 treaties signed between Canada and the native tribes of various regions.

Isn't it possible that some indigenous people "saw the writing on the wall," realized that "if you can't beat 'em, join em," and capitulated with the institutions of their own genocide more enthusiastically than we might demand from the privilege of our armchairs and hindsight?

Yes. But if we're going by possibility it's also possible the chiefs sold out their own people and misrepresented their desires to the Canadian government.

After all in many treaties the financial compensation of the chief was drastically more than the common member. For example in treaty 11 chiefs got 25000 while lay people got 5 dollars. That is a pretty clear disincentive.

There are dangerous precedents that some groups, like procrastinators, learn about but other people seem to have to learn much more slowly.

If you insist on treating every interaction as if it happens in a vacuum and for both parties to see the events as isolated, you're gonna have a bad time. If you are chronically late for work nobody cares if your transmission exploded on the way into work and that's why you were legitimately an hour late. You've already played that card on previous encounters and you've used up all of your credits.

If two groups have a history of horrible interactions with each other, people are going to assume the latest incident is just true to form, even if it really was just a misunderstanding and a bad game of telephone. Because of course Group B pulled some shit again. They 'always' do. Trying to find someone's boundaries and living your life right on the edge of them is just a slower version of "fuck around and find out."

I learned recently that there are actually businesses that cater to the demographic of boomers whose children won't speak to them anymore. Like entrepreneurs are making business plans and incorporating to take money from these people. The stories I know are all about how they realized that their parents weren't even going to meet some fairly low bar set by the kids, and they thought their children were bluffing. You push and push and you'll be making your own retirement home arrangements, all the while repeating some narrative about how it was about pronouns or people of color.

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